Author: cdwan

I think that the TV is really the piece de resistance.

I bought a new instance of my old boots today. Asolo 95 GTX, men’s 10 1/2. I highly recommend them. They are the best boots in the entire universe.

The particular boots I’m replacing have been with me for about six years. I bought them in Minneapolis. The first trip I remember taking in them was when and I climbed the grand canyon back in 2001. They have hiked in Kings Canyon, CA; Alaska; New Mexico, Switzerland, Scotland, Italy, and China. In that time, I have walked about 3/4 of an inch of tread off of them. The sole inserts are coming out, and the seams at the top are beginning to fail. All of the size and make/model information has worn out of the tongue, yet they still look nice on the outside. They have begun to make little wet farting noises when I walk through puddles, beacause I’ve walked the entire exterior layer of sole off of them and water gets between the exterior rubber and the interior padding … and yet they’re still more comfortable than my tennis shoes. I have flat-out sprinted in these boots, and made the train most of the times I’ve tried it.

I think, perhaps, that I will give these boots a warriors funeral. They deserve better than to be tossed in the trash and buried in a landfill.

Just finished Eragon, and it’s good escapist dragon magic teenager-comes-of-age and discovers-that-he-is-the-chosen-one fiction. It’s got all the right themes, plus the font is big and the margins are wide.

I think I’ll go stare at a pebble for a while, trying to make it float into the air using my latent, magical abilities. Then the dragonriders will come take me away from my job, my mortgage, and my obligation to clean the cat box.

As long as I’m the ‘old YouTube late at night, why not:

Oh what the hell:

The dreams have been vivid this week:

Last night I was wandering through my high school relationships, trying to make amends for all the ways that I was immature, more than a decade ago.

The night before that, I was to be hung. I knew that it was on the schedule, but I kept procrastinating in my cell … checking livejournal … reading comics. Finally I looked up and had missed my appointment with the gallows. I rushed out, and the executioner was coming to get me. He was really irked. Said that he had planned to talk to me about a pardon, since I seem like a nice guy, but if I couldn’t even be on time to my own hanging then he didn’t see the point. I finally roused myself to ask why I was to be executed … and it was totally a misunderstanding. Wrong place, wrong time. Everyone agreed, but also seemed to agree that I should have been on time if I wanted to raise these sorts of issues. I woke up as the noose went around my neck. It felt … bad.

Tuesday night, I was fighting. Fighting and fighting. Sometimes winning and sometimes losing … but fighting.

In other news, I got a new scale. It measures body fat. Mine measured at 22% this morning. The chart says that this is “moderate”, as opposed to “good”. “Moderate?” I work out every day! I’m vegetarian! For God’s sake, what does this scale want from me? Why did I buy a device that will do nothing except disapprove of me?

That works out to 38.72 pounds of fat, by the way, which is just a nasty mental image. I’ve hefted 40lb sacks of cat litter. Ick.

We’re thinking that a fun and not terribly expensive way to vastly improve our kitchen would be to replace the ~1972 bright yellow laminate countertops with something a little more classy. capital_l says that this is dead easy, and I believe her. To that end, I continued my neverending quest to find a decent 2D drafting tool for simple home projects. I pulled down the new version of google sketchup, and it mostly does what I want. Took me about an hour to become facile enough to do this:

A couple of techniques continue to elude me. In particular, I want to make small changes to the size of a component. I want to change a rectangle’s width by 1/4″, but when you get within 1/2″ of the old size, it snaps back to the old size! Aigh! Those nasty 3/4″ things are the result of this failure on my part. This means that I frequently wind up starting over, when something is very, very close but not quite the right size. Also, I wish that I could change the display units on *some* of the edges from “foot inch” to “inches”.

How do smart kids do this?

From the New York Times yesterday:

article exerpt

Truly wretched movies are, as the saying goes, like pornography: Hard to describe in very specific language, but you know them when you see them. I would be hard put to actually *rank* the worst movies I’ve seen in any rigorous manner … since there are so many variables involved.

Some things are constant though:

* The movie must take itself seriously … “Jason X” is, by any dramatic standard, a horrible film … but it *knows* that it is terrible, and it constantly winks at us as it goes even more over the top.

* The dialogue must be horrible, with all the fluidity of a glacier, and all the grace of a slug.

* The costumes, sets, camera work, and such must be, at some level, wrong. You can never escape the knowledge that you are watching actors through a camera. You’re looking at the nice shiny belt buckles on the peasant hunters and thinking “those weren’t made with a hammer, and no hunter with half a brain wears shiny metal that reflects while he stalks his prey”

Today, a new movie joins my bottom 10: Eragon. It’s in the same sack as Ultraviolet, Queen of the Damned, and Battlefield Earth. Keep in mind that I *own* Versus and Alien Arsenal. Those last two are high art of a low form. Eragon, well, it just sucks.

Haven’t babbled about myself very much lately. This is because I’m getting a mite stressed about a paper which is supposed to be done on Friday, and my data sucks. Still not sure what a ninja would do in this situation, but my reaction has been procrastination, mostly.

On Monday, I hurtled down two different “black diamond” ski slopes, and survived. Not bad for day three of skiing.

Yesterday, I spent the day in our data center, running disk fixer-upper programs to repair the flubbity-futz from a power failure over the weekend.

Mostly I wanted to link to this post by JWZ in which he notes that:

But let me rephrase that story:

I just felt a bit like I was living in the future for a minute there. I got a little chill.